Experimental Analysis of Ductile Cutting Regime in Face Milling of Sintered Silicon Carbide

In this study, sintered silicon carbide is machined on a high-precision milling machine with a high-speed spindle, closed-loop linear drives and friction-free micro gap hydrostatics. A series of experiments was undertaken varying the relevant process parameters such as feedrate, cutting speed and chip thickness. For this, the milled surfaces are characterized in a process via an acoustic emission sensor. The milled surfaces were analyzed via confocal laser scanning microscopy and the ISO 25178 areal surface quality parameters such as Sa, Sq and Smr are determined. Moreover, scanning electron microscopy was used to qualitatively characterize the surfaces, but also to identify sub-surface damages such as grooves, breakouts and pitting. Raman laser spectroscopy is used to identify possible amorphization and changes to crystal structure. We used grazing incidence XRD to analyze the crystallographic structure and scanning acoustic microscopy to analyze sub-surface damages. A polycrystalline diamond tool was able to produce superior surfaces compared to diamond grinding with an areal surface roughness Sa of below 100 nm in a very competitive time frame. The finished surface exhibits a high gloss and reflectance. It can be seen that chip thickness and cutting speed have a major influence on the resulting surface quality. The undamaged surface in combination with a small median chip thickness is indicative of a ductile cutting regime.

Automated summary

In this study, sintered silicon carbide was machined using a high-precision milling machine, and a series of experiments were conducted by varying process parameters. The milled surfaces were characterized using various analysis methods, and it was found that chip thickness and cutting speed significantly influence the surface quality.